Florida Technology Council releases legislative priorities

The Florida Technology Council (FTC) announced its priorities for the 2016 Legislative Session in a press release Tuesday morning. Increasing “cyber security” and revamping procurement practices for information technology (IT) is high on the list.

The Council “and our membership are pleased to announce our 2016 legislative priorities,” FTC Chair Vivian Myrtetus said.

“(O)ur policymakers have the opportunity to modernize Florida’s IT infrastructure and take advantage of technology to make our state operate more efficiently,” she said. “We look forward to working with the Legislature and Governor as both advocates and a trusted source of information.”

From the press release:

FTC’s priorities for the 2016 Legislative Session include:

♦ Increasing the emphasis on proper planning for coordinated enterprise IT services for the State of Florida;
Supporting investments for adequate resources on a long-term, consistent basis to achieve the efficiencies that well-executed IT services produce;
♦ Advancing IT procurement, so that the process of purchasing technology service is more accurately reflected, including equipping all agencies with the necessary specialized procurement expertise, so that they may properly define the scope of IT procurements;
♦ Consolidating and advancing datacenters in order to modernize applications, which may include moving appropriate applications to the cloud in order to increase productivity and decrease costs;
♦ Increasing the focus on how to use data from various sectors of state government to improve the lives of Floridians;
♦ Opening data efforts to ensure data is accessible to the public, while protecting personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive information;
♦ Increasing analytics and business intelligence tools to ensure better management of state resources;
♦ Providing economic incentives to technology companies that bring highly-skilled, high-paying jobs to Florida, as well as incentive to retrain Florida workers for technology sector jobs;
♦ Increasing access to government services and information via mobile applications and technology, including the development of a robust mobile or smartphone plan that helps enable all Floridians to have access to digital government services; and,
♦ Creating a consistent framework in hopes to increase the emphasis on cyber security throughout state government.

FTC’s mission is to provide a trusted voice in Florida’s capital city for lawmakers, regulators, CIOs, procurement officials and staff to interact with as they seek information from the technology sector. The FTC board includes leading information technology companies, such as Accenture, Advanced System Design, AT&T, Five Points Technology Group, ISF, Kyra Solutions, SAS, Scholastic, SignalVault and Uber Operations.

For more information on FTC and its effort, please visit FLTechCouncil.com, follow @FLTechCouncil and like FB.com/FLTechCouncil.

To join FTC’s effort, please contact Executive Director James Taylor at <[email protected]>.